I must be overlooking something, but if not, the program needs a place to enter the Fermentation schedule. At a minimum a temperature and duration; better a number of temps and durations; and better still the ability to enter a (number of) start temp, stop temp and durations to indicate a rise in temp over a period (say for a Belgian, or a Diacetyl rest for a lager).

C_R_J wrote:im not knockin the idea, but i cant see how this aspect could be very predictable. i dont think ive ever had predictable fermentations. like what would you need it for? im just curious.

I think they are looking to have an easier way to record measured gravities over the course of fermentation rather than predict the fermentation beforehand. From the measurements a graph could be generated to obtain a visual indication of fermentation progress.

1. look at it
2. still bubbling? walk away
3. not bubbling? give it a week and rack

ha. yeah. theres more to it than that. but yeah. it could be nice. maybe work out some progress points, and maybe even a chart to go off of your gravity readings. help you better figure out when its done.

i like the idea, of having a place to chart the progress of the fermentation. i would like to be able to do something with it though. i love graphs, so it would be nice to have various fields to enter the info into (date, time, sg, temperature, etc). then have the abillity to generate graphs based on that data, or at least the abillity to export that data (say as a CSV or even TXT file) for analysis in a spreadsheet program (excel, lotus, whatever).

i do this now from time to time, from my notes, and i have learned some interesting things about how my beers ferment.

C_R_J wrote:im not knockin the idea, but i cant see how this aspect could be very predictable. i dont think ive ever had predictable fermentations. like what would you need it for? im just curious.

While the timings might not be perfectly predicatable, I cannot even find a place to nominate a fermentation temperature at all. So if for this particular recipe you feel you achieve better results at a particular point in the yeast's working range, you can't state that (except in notes).

Further, if you want the fermentation temperatures to change throughtout the ferment (say diacetyl rest for example) you can't state that. I accept that a schedule by days may not work, but perhaps anothr trigger point could be nominated, e.g. "when gravity reaches 1.016 increase ferment temp by 0.5*C/hour to 16*C for a diacetyl rest".

It would be nice to have an ideal fermentation schedule to accompany the recipe. I think brewers know that the actual schedule may have to be modified to fit current conditions. The progress tracking and perhaps automatic schedule adjustment would be nice.